Gerbens’s daughters, of Nathan Strasberg the Jew from Łódź who in Jerusalem translated the appendix to the Shin Bet report for me, he thought it rather ironic that Israeli intervention had the effect of sending a former Nazi to prison in Cairo, it was a kind of relief for him, Nathan was also compiling lists, endless lists of targets, of men to kill, of Palestinian personnel hostile to the Oslo agreements, PFLP, DFLP, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the new “refusal movement” constituted a major risk for the Mossad, and Nathan was gathering information on their schemes, not knowing that very soon after the beginning of the second Intifada he was going to have to murder most of these people, according to the nice doctrine of preventative murder, with air-to-ground missiles over Gaza or Merkava tanks in the West Bank camps, Nathan was a little chubby smiled a lot and was full of good humor I wonder where he is today, a little closer to the end of the world, as the train is crossing the Po almost without slowing down, a factory slips by in white neon lights behind brick walls, a tall structure, metal girders lit here and there by red lamps like a boat—in Venice Ghassan Antoun worked in Porto Marghera in a similar petrochemical establishment, an immense jumble of tubes and storage tanks also lit at night by red lamps that appeared out of the fog, he went home in the early dawn by bus, over the bridge called the “Freedom Bridge” that joins Venice to terra firma and commemorates the end of Austrian domination, Ghassan always gave off a strange smell, like peanuts or grilled corn, washing didn’t do any good this strange chemical smell never left him, it only diminished a little according to his distance from the factory, without ever completely disappearing: the night shift stole his body from him without ever entirely returning it to him, contaminated by familiar and unsettling effluvia, the way a soldier on campaign smells of sweat and grease, I met him at dawn in a bar where daybreak freed me from my walking insomnia, we were both going home like exhausted frozen vampires, he with an anorak over his blue overalls I with my eternal hat shoved down to my eyebrows, he reminded me immediately of Andrija the Slavonic, go figure, there was nothing similar in their features, aside maybe from an unsuitability of the body for its clothes, Andrija always badly dressed the uniform never fit him, either too big or too small, his outfits were stained and his kit dangled oddly he always looked awkward, weighed down by the bag, the ammunition, the weapons and Ghassan in his blue worksuit crammed into the anorak had the same ungainly walk that went with his eternal smile and the little mustache he was so proud of, Andrija killed in central Bosnia near Vitez was reincarnated in the damp cold dawn of a café in Venice, a proletarian café by the lagoon not far from the romantic island cemetery of San Michele—Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Ezra Pound the old madman—which I hadn’t deemed it wise yet to visit, Andrija’s absence, I was probably looking for a replacement for him, a substitute in the great solitary boredom of La Serenissima: Ghassan lived a stone’s throw away in a damp dark apartment that he shared with his cousin head waiter at a luxury hotel Riva degli Schiavoni, that morning we had coffee side by side without exchanging a word, at least that’s what I remember, maybe our countless breakfasts at dawn in the course of the months that followed are superimposed over that first meeting, I forget at what instant exactly I spoke to Ghassan for the first time, I don’t think our friendship was immediate, as they say, in the yellowish lighting of the Piacenza station and the air-conditioning of the train that keeps me from smelling his factory odor, friendship or camaraderie needs time, experience, and if in love the union of bodies gives each the illusion of profound knowledge of the other, so the effluvia of fighters, their sweat and their blood, gives the illusion of intimacy, Ghassan and I observed each other for a long time without sharing anything, despite (or maybe because of) the similarity of our personal stories, the strange points in common that were immediately guessed, the empathy and the resemblance, real or imagined, with Andrija and his mustache, just as in this overheated train I don’t speak to my neighbor, despite the points of contact that could link our existences together, of which this motionless journey is an example, what is he going to discover, where will he get out, Bologna, Florence, or Rome, he looks like he’s bored stiff, his Pronto in his hand, he too is looking out the window Piacenza is fading away and the industrial zone is starting up its intermittent lights, which the night of this flat fertile countryside hides from us at the border of Emilia, crossed by the train—soon Ghassan will be forty, if he’s still alive despite the recent avalanche of corpses in Beirut: did he become one of the bodyguards for Elie Hobeika or some obscure Christian second-in-command, did he take up the weapons he had abandoned in 1991, fleeing the arrival of the Syrian Great Brother in his corner of the mountains, who knows, I left Ghassan when I left Venice, and afterwards, in Trieste or during one of my trips to Beirut on business as they say, I didn’t seek him out, he had told me though where his family lived, right in the middle of the hill of Achrafieh that overlooks the eastern side of the city, he had said that from the roof of his building you could see the sea, much bluer than in Venice, much more sea-like than that interminably flat lagoon: the eastern Mediterranean its colors marked by the seasons like a tree, from grey to turquoise, beneath the immense sky of Lebanon that the mountains make even vaster by limiting it, in the reflections of the summits, Ghassan vanished like Andrija, finally disappeared in his turn and maybe helped by age didn’t I try to replace him too, to fill the void left by the end of that cold friendship that began in a bar at dawn facing the island of San Michele the floating cemetery of Venice with its corner for foreigners, we saw each other every morning or almost at daybreak, Ghassan was emerging from his factory of fertilizers or God knows what putrid residue and I from my nocturnal wanderings, a way to escape the woman who had joined me in Venice whom I no longer wanted to see, I think, unless the opposite was true, she obstinately refused to go to bed with me arguing that Venice made her depressed, which was probably true, she was always cold, she didn’t eat much, but today I realize that she was my reflection, that I was the depressed one, most likely, motionless in Venice as I am now in this train, on my way to recovery, to oblivion, to two years of war I lost roaming through Croatia and Bosnia, I had wanted Marianne to join me but I preferred solitude and the company of Ghassan, Nayef, and the others, we didn’t meet often, she slept at night, whereas I slept during the day, exhausted by insomnia—maybe that was the consequence of two years of amphetamines, two years of cultivating the body, two years of fear of dying in the mud, huge hangovers two years of bullets bombs alcohol and drugs it was a miracle I thought that Marianne waited for me, that she came to join me in Venice which was not a romantic choice but a way of disappearing, an island outside of time and outside of space, a tomb for me and for Andrija who was rotting in my memories as he was decomposing in the earth, on weekends Ghassan and I got drunk—often he told me stories about the civil war in Lebanon, his own war, he was on the side of the Lebanese Forces, of course, on the side of the flag and the crucifix that was so similar to us Croats, he was sixteen at the fall of West Beirut, in 1982, when Intissar and the Palestinian fighters left Lebanon, Ghassan had thought the war was over, he had enlisted a few months later when the massacre had started up again, inspired by his elders who told him about the glorious years in the 1970s, when the other side was leftist, long-haired, and wore an upside-down Mercedes symbol for a badge, later the enemy was Druze, then Syrian, then Christian during the last great confrontation that put the mountain to fire and sword for nothing, the city was burning, he said, the bombings were more intense than ever, Geagea’s Lebanese Forces were fighting against General Aoun, in that mixture of pride, power and money that summarized his country so well: he might have fought against Marwan, Ahmad and Intissar, maybe even against Rafael Kahla the author of the story, who knows, every time I went to Beirut I thought about Ghassan’s stories, and the new contacts in my new profession told me more stories of war and espionage, Lebanon is a market stall by the sea, said Kamal Jumblatt, and everything’s for sale, everything’s for sale, especially information and the lives of the undesirable, Kamal the father of Walid Jumblatt prince of the Druzes the funniest the cleverest the cruelest of the lords of the Lebanese war, secluded in his palace in Mukhtara to escape the Syrian bombs and the car bombs, Walid the killer of Christians from the Shouf is a witty, cultivated and very wealthy man, his warriors were the toughest, the boldest, the craziest, the bloodiest, they infuriated their leader because they were incapable of marching in step, but they had no equals in leaving 200 dead on a village square in less time than it takes to say so, and in that tiny country where everything is known or everything happens among family they tell the most unlikely stories about the warlord Walid, they make you smile and tremble at the same time, like all of Lebanon, country of laughs and shudders: one night he invited a cousin and his wife Nora to dinner, up there in his mountain, and at the end of the meal,
